Question 2 Transcript - Jacob Knowles

Media Transcript For Question 2

In this film, I am going to be talking about how the ancillary tasks (the film review and also the film poster) worked effectively with the main task to create a strong final product. This final product is essentially a complete marketing package which could potentially be used to market, distribute, and profit off of the short film that we have created.

The first of the two secondary tasks that I’m going to be talking about is the film poster. The audience that we were targeting with our short film is both males and females between the ages of 18 and 35; thus, the target audience of our poster is also the same. We primarily tried to target this audience through using similar genre conventions in our poster as we did in the film. Though the amount of these we could achieve was limited because of the limitations making a poster faces as opposed to making a film.

One of the elements of the poster that I focused on was the imagery. In the poster I included a heavily distorted image of the antagonist in our film, I split the image into it’s three different layers of colour (cyan, yellow, magenta), and moved each layer of colour so they were all slightly off centre. I then distorted this image further through smudging the edges. I think the distorted effect that I created is very effective at conveying the genre conventions that I wanted to when I started making the poster.

The font that I used when creating the poster is very reminiscent of the font seen at the start of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, I thought this was appropriate for the poster simply because it seemed to fit well when I first used it. I used a plain white colour for the font because it’s the most readable colour on the black background that I was using.

Apart from the array of colour that’s visible in the imagery of the poster, I chose to use simple black and white colour throughout the poster.  I chose to use simple colours because I wanted to include a lot of information and content on the poster without making it seem overcrowded. When I experimented with other colours in the poster it looked much more cluttered and unorderly, so I changed it to look the way it does now.

I also included relevant awards for British Independent short films on the poster. I made sure these awards were relevant because otherwise it would make little/no sense in the context of our film.

I decided that the location that the poster was set was unimportant for the effect that I was trying to achieve, this is because I wanted to isolate the antagonist from the backdrop. The place I really wanted to set the poster was inside the protagonist’s mind, and this is best way that I could find to represent that.

All of these elements that I have discussed are constructs of the psychological thriller genre, and I used them as effectively as I could in order to make the poster work well in combination with the main task. Beyond working well in combination with the short film, I also wanted the poster to be attractive and to work well when marketing the film and I feel as though I have achieved that. In marketing our film, I would spread my poster through both social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I would also try and inform people on its existence through simple, old fashioned, word of mouth.

The Little White Liars magazine film review that I’ve written for our film is primarily targeted at the normal target demographic for LWL magazine, which is both males and females between the ages of 26 and 35. Though not exactly the audience we were targeting with our film, it’s very similar and this means that the review is more easily effective at marketing the film towards our audience. The LWL magazine communicates with its target audience through two different ways.

The first way that LWL magazine communicates with its audience is through the language and media language that’s used in it. It uses lots of media language and more mature language which is appropriate for the audience that it’s targeting.

The layout of the review also heavily contributes towards the demographic that it’s targeting. All of the articles in the LWL magazine are set out in the same way, with the same elements being in the exact same places. This creates a level of conformity and professionalism that isn’t seen in other movie review magazines and articles. One of the features of the layout that allows it to effectively target the young adult demographic is the three-number based rating system, giving each film that’s reviewed three scores. The first of these scores is the anticipation, the second is the enjoyment, and the third is the rating of the film in retrospect. This system allows the film review to be summarised at a very quick glance, allowing people to understand the review at its core no matter how busy they are, as a working young adult or film student.

The magazine uses very professional fonts such as Algerian for the main body of the text, and Century Gothic for specific titles. All of the fonts used in the magazine are sans-serif to maintain simplicity throughout all of the articles.